youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interf

youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer. For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality). Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain. If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.